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AI powered Games - Copyright issues
I totally believe AI is the future of Adventure Gaming (and Gaming in general). There probably won’t be classic game titles in the future anymore (like Broken Sword X), more like completely unique adventures generated for every single player differently and on-demand by an AI, with unique story, locations, characters/animations, puzzles…
But today, games integrating AI are kicked out of the game stores due to the uncertain copyright situation. Valve for example has a very strict policy now, first they started to ban games with AI generated assets from Steam (like AI generated images from Midjourney and Stable Diffusion).
A couple days ago Valve also started to ban the first games that integrated the ChatGPT API, usually used to make game NPC’s more life-like.
So for the game devs here in the forum, be careful what assets you use in your games and what information you disclose to the public, regarding your development process. And for the players, don’t go around mindlessly posting about AI generated assets (if you suspect any in your favorite games) in the Steam comments and discussion boards. It might lead to the game getting kicked out of the store. This is seriously a problem atm, the devs of my favorite adventure game from this year are deleting steam comments for their game like crazy, from people mentioning AI generated art.
Hopefully a sensible solution to this copyright problematic will be found in the near future, when the first court rulings have been pronounced on this.
That’s quite fascinating.
I’d never thought about copyright implications of using AI to generate stuff where it is, or at least may be, basing what it does on the work of others - which is pretty much all AI can do I suppose.
It leads on to an interesting question of not just what can AI do, but what is it ethical/legal/appropriate to ask it to do and what restrictions and punishments are even possible on that except at the ‘end product’ level of game store or examining board or employer?
While I’m a bit sorry for the dev mentioned above, if the use of ChatGPT is as optional as he says I suspect it wouldn’t be impossible to remove that part from the game and re submit.
3.5 time winner of the “Really Annoying Caption Contest Saboteur” Award!
I fully support banning of all and every AI games, art, etc. created for profit.
AI is using, mixing and altering art created by artists that didn’t allow such use. That’s the end of the debate. It’s definitely a copyright issue and EU countries (at least) are working on laws that will put some order in this recent AI chaos.
There will have to be some underlying code that will be easy to check for possible AI (mis)use.
It’s tough situation. I think that that game stores may create special categories for games that use AI. This will let players know what they can expect from these games and help avoid legal issues.
That’s one of the daftest things I’ve heard in a long time. Copyright is copyright and that’s it. Using someone else’s work for your own gain is theft, pure and simple.
Sticking anything using AI to create a game and putting it under the banner of a AI “store” thinking that absolves the creator is quite simply (not putting what I really think as I might get banned 
)
I fully support banning of all and every AI games, art, etc. created for profit.
AI is using, mixing and altering art created by artists that didn’t allow such use. That’s the end of the debate. It’s definitely a copyright issue and EU countries (at least) are working on laws that will put some order in this recent AI chaos.
There will have to be some underlying code that will be easy to check for possible AI (mis)use.
Should I find any of my poetry stolen and used in this way (unlikely I know 
) I’d go after the perpetrators with everything I could manage and so should anyone else that it happens to.
One thing doesn’t appear to have been considered - as far as I can tell anyway - is: what happens when everything out there is a complete mishmash of plagiarised “art” in all of its forms. No-one will be wishing to spend hours on a piece of whatever knowing that some totally uncreative person will come along and steal it. Human creativity, in its widest sense, will come to an end.
The Matrix, here we come 
Life is what it is.
It needs to be mentioned, there are no legal rulings on this matter yet, Steam is acting precautionary here to be on the safe side until legal clarity on the matter is established.
The biggest Steam competitor, the Epic Games Store, has taken a more AI friendly stance so far, here’s Tim Sweeney’s (Epic founder and CEO) take on the matter. He also addresses the “mishmash” argument and argues human creativity is actually similar to these large data models that take in billions of image/text/audio samples to output a new creation.
Basically most modern games are developed with AI tools in the development process in some form or another.
For example most software developers today use GitHub copilot or OpenAI ChatGPT for code generation. You can basically ask these tools to write the code for you, like a whole shader if you need one, or ask them to create a code snippet in the programming language of your choice for a specific task, which you then can embed in the codebase with only minor adjustments. It’s about efficiency/productivity, you can code much faster with AI tools.
Also in case of assets you can generate images, videos, text, audio samples, 3d models (...) with AI tools. Like for example you can use artificial voice actors (much cheaper and more flexible than real ones), or generate music scores (much cheaper and faster than hiring composers), the story and dialogues of your game can be entirely written by an AI (the dialogue can even be dynamic, meaning NPCs can react to any player input, like you would be talking to a real person instead of an NPC with predefined answers), images can be generated with very little effort for ingame art, app logos, merchandise, prototyping/inspiration… In most cases you won’t even notice the devs used AI tools for specific assets.
As an example I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of St. Louis Cemetery like in Gabriel Knight, pixel art style. This is the result, with a bit additional manual work put into this it could be used as background in an adventure game. It took 3 seconds to generate just by giving a simple text prompt, an artist would take hours for this and cost enormous amount of money. Something like this is especially interesting for indie developers who lack budget.
I fully support banning of all and every AI games, art, etc. created for profit.
Agreed! (I wouldn’t put it quite as strongly, but there’s enough shovelware around without people putting all of three seconds worth of effort into “their” art, even if we ignore the dubious ethics of those image generators.)
You can play my game Frasse and the Peas of Kejick for free! (AG review here.)
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